1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a hard disk drive and more particularly, to a hard disk drive with divided data sectors and a hard disk drive controller for controlling the same.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Hard disk drives are data storage devices that read and write information to and from a magnetic disk. Hard disk drives write information to the disk via a write head and read information from the disk via a read head according to a command (e.g., a write command or a read command) received from a host (e.g., a personal computer (PC)). The disk includes a plurality of tracks. Each of the tracks is divided into a plurality of logical units called sectors. Writing/reading is performed in units of sectors. Generally, each sector is 512 bytes in size. With the increase of storage capacity of hard disk drives, the recording density of disks is increased and the number of sectors per track is also increased.
The storage capacity of hard disk drives has been increasing, and as they process more data, a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and a bit error ratio (BER) also increase proportionally. When the number of sectors per track increases, the size of an address mark and error correction code (ECC) corresponding to each sector also increases, and therefore, there is a limit to how many sectors may be included in each track. Accordingly, methods of increasing the storage capacity of tracks by increasing the capacity of a sector from 512 bytes to 1 Kbytes or 4 Kbytes have been researched and developed.
However, when an error occurs in a data sector, all data in that sector may be lost. Accordingly, as the size of the sectors increase, the amount of data that is lost to a sector error is also increased.